Who's the daddy?

A 3.5-million-year-old skull unearthed in a gully in Kenya may force scientists to re-examine the evolution of modern humans.

The skull, and additional pieces of jaws and teeth, have been classified as part of a previously unknown hominid species dubbed "flat-faced human from Kenya", Kenyanthropus platyops. Only one other hominid species, Australopithecus afarensis, dates from a similar age 3 to 4 million years ago.

That discovery made A. afarensisand its most famous member, the fossil Lucythe sole candidate as ancestors of modern humans. "It seemed as if our lineage had to run through Lucy," says Frank Brown, a geologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City who dated the Kenyan remains. "But that was before this very nice skull."

Several features of K. platyops distinguish it from Lucy and her kin. It has a less protruding jaw and more pronounced cheekbones, making the face less ape-like and more ...

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